"Never underestimate the resistance to change from lawyers. Even more likely, never underestimate the ability of lawyers to describe virtual status quo efforts as revolutionary change."
Great op-ed by David Brooks. Something to think about for education providers:
Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies. In an online world, colleges have to think hard about how they are going to take communication, which comes over the Web, and turn it into learning, which is a complex social and emotional process.
"There was some discussion of the break-up of ALI-ABA, which I confess to previously not knowing much about. One hypothesis I gathered from an attendee was that ALI-ABA as a joint venture faced increasing competition from for-profit CLE firms, which have turned the business of continuing legal education upside-down by heavily discounting the cost of CLE through selling advertising and delivering the material online. Thus, like most modern media firms, the “product” of for-profit CLE is increasingly your eyeballs watching a computer screen (sold to third parties), not the content itself. These developments undermined ALI-ABA’s business model of selling high quality CLE at real locations, and thus required innovation in the relationship. Maybe that’s the story, and if so it shows how technological disruption can affect the law in unexpected ways."
Terre Rushton,Director of Custom Program, Training and Curriculum for NITA, talks about the importance of “learning-by-doing” for new associates.
Some great ways to improve quality of speakers at conferences from Scott Berkun.
"When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington’s battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did.These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
- Mark Twain"
- Mark Twain"
The explicit information we all learned in school is ubiquitously available on the internet. The traditional teacher who lectures to a group in order to convey this information is obsolete. In environments that encourage learning by doing, we need coaches rather than teachers. We need people who observe us in action, correct our mistakes, and point us in the right direction. We need mentors who have the experience to help us formulate the questions we don’t yet know how to ask.
Interesting platform for engaging in video chats that allow you to move from conversation to conversation.
